reviewed the Form 990s for 91 nonprofit organizations<\/a> — including Columbia, Emory, Harvard, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Minnesota, Penn, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, USC, and Yale — and found that the organizations reported $412.9 million of income from unrelated business activities, but 46 (51%) reported zero tax liabilities:<\/p>\nThe finding does not mean that the nonprofit organizations have run afoul of tax laws. In fact, legal experts say charities are merely following federal tax laws on the books for years that allow them to shield much of their income from tax through exemptions that Congress has built into the tax code and to take myriad expenses as deductions for operating expenses<\/em>. …<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis was (and, presumably, still is) Minnesota Public Radio’s big dodge for the past decade and a half; spin off companies like “Rivertown Trading” (a catalog knick-knack sales operation that moved everything from Lake Wobegone memorabilia to snarky sweatshirts) and others.\u00a0 It made vats full of money, while MPR begged and pleaded both on the air and at the various capitols for more.<\/p>\n
<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Non-profits shield scads of income from the IRS through “unrelated business activities”: The Chronicle of Philanthropy reviewed the Form 990s for 91 nonprofit organizations — including Columbia, Emory, Harvard, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Minnesota, Penn, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, USC, and Yale — and found that the organizations reported $412.9 million of income from unrelated business activities, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}